By Toni Piñera
Inspiration is the vital weapon of the creator, and when it is intermingled with an unlimited imagination that crosses borders of reality/unreality, everything multiplies. The result is an integral, comprehensive, subjugating work… that catches all eyes and, above all, the souls. Because there are ingredients of the internal side that come to afloat to destabilize us in emotions.
In his artistic work, Tony Rodríguez (Juan Antonio Rodríguez Olivares) exploits the symbolic and hidden side of objects, and also those special relationships established at the unconscious level. Hence, in his peculiar creations, where the most varied objects of human daily life are recycled, he shows scenes that seem drawn from the dream world and, as such, transport us to an intangible reality close to us. It is similar to what happens when insects are trapped in the amber millions of years ago. His work transports us to a distant time and, at the same time nearby, motionless and frenetic, where objects get confused and mix in curious forms and connections. They represent the internal world and its complex connections in each emotional moment.
Freud discovered the hidden language of dreams. He went further than anyone in the understanding of dream language, which helped to consolidate the theory of the unconscious. He captured the symbolic side of facts, acts, thoughts … and saw that one thing is what we say, do and think, and another or what we really want to do and where thoughts and attitudes are directed…
His inner world is reflected in the surface of his pieces. It is, we could say without equivocation, a mirror of the soul. Through that visual map that fascinates us the gaze roams. Corners and facets of his life, memories, experiences, feelings, longings, dreams, and many more things emerge. Digging in his images many answers will come. Because what is woven within Man is common to all mortals, life, which although it walks on different and individual paths, always converges in a place where we are all one.
Tony Rodríguez is one of those artists of the visual image who in a short time has managed to universalize the reach of his Latin American condition. Because he is one of those who know how to integrate factors of national and continental idiosyncrasy (of the “real marvelous”), in the warp of what they artistically do, in the chosen visual language, in the signs and metaphors that they inhabit within their communicative images… It is, in a few words, a maker of strange worlds that cross the gaze raising images that although recognizable, resemble different stages of man, tinged by an unlimited imagination that makes us travel by universes where the present dresses of past and future. We walk through other dimensions and even the most varied cardinal points of human life…
Designs of any epoch, invented objects, elements of constructions of other times… emerge from the depths of the painting and fragments of material on the surface of the paintings that resemble “petroglyphs” and become graffiti of the present. The passage of time, we would say, is discovered in the successive layers of pigment, which function as reliefs, as rich in the textures of their surfaces as in their context. The creator is never content to represent life from a single perspective or through a technical dimension. His paintings, objects and other projects of multiple techniques capture a dynamic vision, sometimes chaotic, of the human condition, as existential as provocative, and much more, witty. Precise details and indefinite visions of the passage of time, captivate the audience and invite to speculate on the meaning of life in a world overflowed by technology, although often he invents his own. A fabric painted by the creator comes alive in virtue of the enigmatic coloring-an element that enriches the works, since there is a wisdom in him of placing it in the right place-, the fillings that often cross the painting as well as the accumulation of strange substances (materials forced to coexist with painting and talented drawing).
Solitary beings, surrounded by objects, and fragments of time and space…, the human spirit becomes ambivalent and indomitable. And it is unified within a pictorial space eroded to the same extent that its recognizable humanity appears challenged by the future. To emphasize this, the artist creates strange perspectives or scenes that vary even within the same work. It is that there is a visual delight in the excited energy of each painting, because that is the mind-thought of the creator. The images of Tony Rodríguez’s pieces are in a tense balance between opposing forces created by veils of colors and harsh textures –in many of them– and their constant metamorphosis.
A characteristic of his pictorial work are those figures that occupy surfaces in a way that makes them particularly vulnerable. They become metaphors of the earthly existence described through painting in unique ways. More than abstract or figurative values, the strangely vital and surprisingly diverse formal explorations that inform the work of the artist take the human situation as its point of departure. Safe strokes, environmental lyricism, overflowing creativity, and a sophisticated approach to the construction of the image distinguish his work as evidence of a unique artistic vision that has been recognized through original and daring exhibitions, and acclaim by critics and public. No doubt, he is also a “clairvoyant” who can see the passages of life through which human beings must navigate full of complexity and contradiction.
